


You know?

by miissedappointments



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Flashbacks Galore, Idols, OC but they're just a vehicle for the yeonbin, Post-Canon, Seriously there's no resolution, Somewhere between platonic and romantic love, Yeonjun barista sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26536549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miissedappointments/pseuds/miissedappointments
Summary: This time, he doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be. In another universe, a better version of himself gets Soobin to stay. Is exactly the right combination of nodes and crevices so that Soobin feels about Yeonjun the way Yeonjun feels about Soobin: that he can’t bear to let go. Yeonjun doesn’t know how to be that person. There’s no lesson plan, no model. Just his current self, in all the wrong shapes and sizes, and Soobin, here, saying goodbye.A few years into their career, TOMORROW X TOGETHER gets to take a break. Soobin tells Yeonjun he wants one too, though neither of them are entirely sure what it's a break from. Yeonjun has a conversation with a stranger and tries to make sense of things.
Relationships: Choi Soobin/Choi Yeonjun
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	You know?

Yeonjun can never get the ratio just right.

True to form, he’s managed to pick up all the other duties of working at his aunt’s cafe pretty quickly – cranking the noisy bingsu machine, packaging buns in crinkly plastic and shelving them in record time, ringing up orders on the old register with faded Konglish labels and working the finicky paging coasters that vibrate (or that are _supposed_ to vibrate) when an order is ready. But after two weeks, the correct combination of ice, milk, and espresso for a perfect latte still escapes him.

It’s frustrating.

No matter how hard he practices, pouring and marking the liquid levels mentally on the cups with a sharp eye like he’d mark the key points in his choreography, he always ends up falling short, the humiliating empty space between the top of the drink and the top of the cup mocking him frothily, or, even worse, overshooting and spilling coffee all over the counter. It doesn’t help that the cafe sells everything in multiple sizes; more ice, less ice, plastic cups for to-go or skinnier glassware for the couples on dates and the students who study for hours at the back tables. Not to mention customers who bring their own containers in a variety of sizes for carry-out, a custom that Yeonjun understands is good for the planet but that he has quietly come to resent nonetheless. 

Even with the standard plastic cups that his aunt buys in bulk from the restaurant depot, Yeonjun can’t seem to figure it out. He’s convinced it’s the ice. Though only a bit of it melts when he pours in the milk and the hot espresso shots, the resulting volume remains stubbornly unpredictable. He’s staring at a cup in his hand, eyes narrowed and bottom lip pushed out in a concentrated pout, when the door jingles open. When he looks up, the first thing he notices is that the girl who’s just walked in is Asian, tanned with black curled hair.

There aren’t that many Asian people around here – Yeonjun’s aunt and uncle had left Seoul for America when he was just a baby, moving to some nondescript town in a state he’d never heard of so his uncle could join a mechanical engineering PhD program at the local university. His aunt had worked odd jobs at a tailor’s, a nail salon, trying to put together some income outside of the meager grad school stipend. After finishing his degree and post-grad work, Yeonjun’s uncle had gotten an assistant professorship offer at a university in a different part of the state, and the family – two young children included now – had moved there, his aunt using what they’d managed to save to open up the cafe. The closest Korean supermarket is three towns and a forty minute drive away, as is the Korean church that Yeonjun’s aunt insists on taking them all to every Sunday. He’s not much of a god person, but neither are his cousins, or any of the other people his age who show up every week. They spill out of the backseats of their parents’ cars in the morning blinking sleep out of their eyes, trailing behind gossip-bearing moms with permed hair and dads in golf polos before linking up with their respective cliques and pretending they weren’t all taking soju shots together and grinding in the youth group worship leader’s basement until 2AM the previous night. The bright sun climbs overhead and threatens to melt the wooden varnish off the near-identical crosses dangling from every rearview mirror in the church parking lot. Yeonjun listens to the pastor in a grey sportcoat talk about guilt, penance, fear, blessings, staccato syllables bouncing off the triangle ceiling of the chapel, constrained from reaching the heavenly dwelling place of whatever being he’s talking about. Sometimes the man gets so excited that he slips into Korean, which jolts Yeonjun awake. _아멘_. After service and a substantial amount of milling about the chilly sanctuary for those last bits of conversation the families disperse, only to run into each other again in the aisles of the grocery store as they stock up on gochujang and green onions before the long trip home. 

Yeonjun puts the offending cup down and watches the girl wander along the snake-like arrangement of shelves and tables offering pastries, breads, snacks. He observes the slope of her nose, her double eyelids. In Korea, it’s easy to tell when someone’s a foreigner. The language barrier is an obvious giveaway, but even Korean-Americans who can speak well enough are identifiable just by the way they walk around the streets of Seoul. The ones who travel alone are usually guarded, eyes scanning the intersections and shop names on the way to their next destination, unfamiliarity and a constrained but desperate longing painting lightly over each gesture as they brush their hair out of their eyes or shift the straps of their backpacks. Young foreigners who come in groups have a markedly different center of gravity: something about the way they move as a unit, commanding attention or gathering around street vendors or teasing each other and breaking off, reminds Yeonjun of a loud, living organism with many heads. One whose motor system and distribution of inertia is vastly different from what he’s used to. 

Then again, it’s not completely unfamiliar. He did spend two years in the U.S, after all. He was just a kid back then, but he remembers some things. Birthday parties at the local McDonald’s play area; bouncy balls and cheap squishy floor mats and sweaty plastic tube slides spiraling down, down, down. The dry mountains of San Jose still loom in the background of his dreams sometimes. 

The girl pokes at a taro bun thoughtfully, with a look on her face like she’s trying to hear its cries for help. He wonders vaguely where she’s from. Working in an American cafe for the summer, there are so many different types of people that they start to blur together under a single shared, defining characteristic: _not like Yeonjun._ Not Korean, or not born and raised in South Korea, or certainly – most certainly – not a K-pop idol. Of course, that last part applies even back in Seoul. Most of his friends from before his trainee and celebrity life had gone the regular university route, studying business or biology or computer science, then on to office jobs at large corporations or graduate school abroad or, for the ones who were either lucky enough to not mind or unlucky enough to have no other choice, part-time at a local cafe. 

In that sense, things had kind of come full circle. When Bang PD had sat the group down and told them they could take one month of the summer off after three years of promoting and a successful international tour under their belts, Yeonjun had assumed he would just stay in Seoul and do what normal kids did during their breaks. Roll around at home, eat his mom’s cooking, go out to the mall and the movies with a hoodie on and a mask over his face. Hang out with his members somewhere that wasn’t their dorm or practice studio. No cameras. No phone pinging with Weverse reminders or manager check-ins. 

But then Soobin had pulled him aside outside of BigHit’s artist lounge right before he went back to Ansan and told him that he’d wanted to take a break. A break from what? It wasn’t clear to either of the boys – they’d never really defined their relationship concretely. (How could they, with the lives they lived?) But somewhere in those three years, all the _I love yous_ , the physical affection, the emotional dependence had taken on a sheen that went beyond even the heightened stakes of brotherhood that emerges in the most intense of situations. Like being an idol. Late nights when Soobin declined Beomgyu’s request to play games online and padded to Yeonjun’s single room instead, draping the upper half of his body on the bed with his legs splayed on the hardwood floor to read a slim book or scroll through his phone. Yeonjun prodding him – _ya, Soobin-ah_ – to distract himself from the way his brain started to squirm in the silence after a long day, asking about the best things to do in Ansan or Soobin’s older sister or whatever else came to mind. Soobin humming in response, giving short answers until he was sufficiently distracted from his book and remembered some long and aimless anecdote from middle school, at which point he would sit up and start talking animatedly about his friends who dragged him out on summer nights to play and get bitten up by mosquitoes along the canal running through part of the city. _You know, right hyung? That feeling of just being free?_ And Yeonjun said yes, would have said yes to anything just to keep that look of sincere wonder on Soobin’s face. Eventually those late nights got even later, whispered and rushed in a way that was confusing at first but just as quickly fell exactly into place, as natural as the moon treading its slow arc through the dark sky. 

To be fair, he hadn’t always felt this way about his fellow member. And Yeonjun has never been too good at discerning admiration, or aspiration, from love. He only really started paying more attention to Soobin (and Beomgyu, and Hueningkai) once it was announced that they would debut together, once they had to decide what kind of group they would be and who would lead them. That’s when he really started looking.

In that time, what Yeonjun saw with his watchful eyes was what he should’ve known all along: that Soobin was the best of them all. The older boy had never been too good at figuring out what to say when people were struggling. His own way of dealing with difficulties was simple: just try harder. Another rep, another round. With enough late nights practicing, enough sore muscles and bruised knees, things would be forced to fit into place. That’s how it had always been for him, after all. He wasn’t a bad listener, had a pat on the back and a hug for anyone who needed it, but at the end of the day he couldn’t find the right words to really make someone feel better. What worked for him didn’t work for everyone, and he didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to reach into someone else’s brain and figure out what they needed to hear. But Soobin did. Soobin, who grew up with so much love that he could barely fathom anything else; Soobin, who listened to every person with his entire being, eyes never leaving your face, shoulders leaning forward so that his broad upper body formed a shield from the rest of the world, fists lightly clenched in concentration as if ready to fight off your inner demons the minute you say the word. He walked the members through each and every thing and made them feel _known_. And known was loved, at least when Soobin knew you. 

Yeonjun is hard to know. 

Through unfocused eyes, he notices the girl in the cafe stiffen and glance over at him and realizes that he’s been looking in her direction the entire time, giving the impression that he was staring. He feels bad. He knows what it’s like, and while most of the time he revels in being seen, it feels strange being on the other side of things. Yeonjun looks away and busies himself with organizing the cup sleeves at the counter, pale green with no special decorations or patterns. 

A few moments later, the girl is at the counter with two pastries. The taro bun is still recovering from the slight dent her finger had put in it earlier.

“Hey, how’s it going?” she asks, but her eyes are on the chalkboard menu above Yeonjun’s head instead of his actual face. 

“I’m fine, and you?” Yeonjun replies, the words triggering memories of learning conversational English phrases from a textbook in middle school. _I am fourteen years old. I live in Seoul. I have no siblings. My hobby is dancing. What’s your hobby?_

The girl looks down again. If she hears any faint tint in Yeonjun’s cadence, she doesn’t show it. He’s had enough customers come through who raise their eyebrows or cock their heads at his slight accent, as if taken aback that in a Korean cafe with Korean desserts and Korean signage there might be an employee who doesn’t speak English as his first language. No matter how hard Yeonjun practices, there’s always some tell. Some giveaway in the way he laces words together or the smallest stumble over a covert syllable. He’s seen the way interviewers’ eyes glaze over and their smiles freeze when he and his other members speak. Americans are sensitive like that, even though they themselves have a whole range of accents and styles of speaking, some grammatically incorrect and nearly impossible to decipher. At least this girl doesn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah, good. Can I also get a large iced latte?”

A latte. 

“Sure,” Yeonjun says gamely, ringing up the bread items and putting them on a tray. “Anything else?”

“Nope,” she shakes her head, pulling a small wallet out of her back pocket and sliding a credit card out of the first slot. She’s wearing a t-shirt with a nondescript logo on it, some design with the letter P that Yeonjun hasn’t seen before, and medium wash jeans. Silver earrings. A grey backpack slung over one shoulder. He wonders if she’s a student at the local university where his uncle teaches, but she also looks older than him so maybe not. When he looks up from the cash register, she’s looking directly at his face, slightly quizzical. He doesn’t flinch, just gives her a close-mouthed, feline grin. 

“What’s your name?” he asks, raising one eyebrow in a challenge. He can’t help it. 

“Alice.” Her own brows twitch as she looks down and swipes her card, punching in a tip amount. Not that it matters, since Yeonjun still doesn’t really understand tipping and he’s not getting paid for working at the cafe anyway. He gets room and board with his aunt and her family, three home-cooked meals a day, access to their Netflix and Viki accounts. No complaints. 

“Okay, thank-you-have-a-nice-day.” He finishes the transaction and heads back to try his luck at making the drink.

“Thanks,” Alice calls out, taking the tray and retreating to one of the tables at the big window along the side of the cafe. 

A large latte is two shots. Yeonjun pours ice single-file into a tall glass, the cubes clambering over each other as they settle. The milk disrupts the precarious formation, melting down some of the sharp edges slightly even though it’s just come out of the fridge. The boy watches the white liquid rise carefully out of the corner of his eye, as if he doesn’t want the drink to know he’s looking. Something they’d been taught during their trainee days was that desperation was a put-off. You have to want it – want it bad – but never let on to the audience just how bad. Look enthusiastic, intense, but never too eager. Keep your cool. He pulls the carton back without second guessing. 

When he brings the two small bell creamers of espresso over and sets them down one on either side of the glass, he wonders if maybe he should’ve second guessed. For someone who’s always been aware of his own body and its fluid occupation of space, he’s surprisingly terrible at judging how actual liquids fill a container. Standing there for a moment trying to size up what’s in front of him, he’s seized by a sudden urge to take charge of the mockingly absurd situation. It’s just a latte, for god’s sake. Who cares if it’s perfect? With each hand, he loops an index finger into the handle of a small metal cup and jerks his wrists to dump the caffeinated contents simultaneously into the milk with a splash. _Take that, drink!_

It’s too much liquid. 

At the exact moment the glass overflows he hears a voice call out, “Hey, what’s the wifi pass– oh…” 

Yeonjun looks up to see Alice standing by the pick-up area, a slightly confused look on her face as she takes in the way that he, for seemingly no reason, just ruined her drink. There’s an entire espresso shot running down the sides of the glass, pooling on the metal counter, dripping onto the floor and threatening Yeonjun’s white Converse high-tops. He’s still dangling the two cups from his index fingers. Now empty, they swing back and forth wildly a few times before coming to a slow pendulum sway.

“Sorry –” he blurts, at the same time that she finds her own words.

“It’s fine –” she holds up both hands, fingers splayed wide and palms facing him, and something in the back of Yeonjun’s head wonders if that’s where Hueningkai picked up the habit. He stops. 

“Um, it’s fine,” she says again. “I’ll just take it,” inclining her head slightly at the dripping drink. 

“No I can make it again, I just, uh…” Yeonjun doesn’t know what he _just_ , except that the momentary triumph he felt when he emptied the espressos with such impulsive finality earlier is long gone. He’s failed, again. 

Alice smooths out her forehead, forcing it into a more neutral state and relaxing the furrow of her chin. She has a mouth like Soobin’s – slightly thinner but overly defined Cupid’s bow peaks over a full bottom lip. No dimples, though, when she lets out a nervous giggle. 

“Please don’t,” she says, reaching out her hand. “I’ll just drink it, really.” She sees Yeonjun’s hesitation, and her eyes flick to the steady drops of brown liquid free-falling to the ground with increasing frequency. “Seriously.” 

Yeonjun pushes his shoulders back and hands the glass over. Keep your cool.

“Wifi password is by the cash register.” 

Alice nods, smiling now, and grabs a napkin to clean off the sides of the cup before walking over to the register. Yeonjun busies himself with wiping down the counter and the floor, chasing down the streaks of tiny droplets left by the folds and edges of the towel before throwing the cloth into the wash bin.

//

“Hyung, I just feel like… I need to figure out who I’ve become. Without all of this. Without…” the word _you_ hangs in the air as Soobin purses his lips closed. 

“But –” Yeonjun’s mouth moves to protest before his brain even knows what he wants to say. There are so many buts. _But I love you. But you love me. But the members. But… the fans._ He grimaces internally at that last one. It’s true, Yeonjun is far from immune to the way the fans adore him and Soobin. He sees the yeonbin comments, the photosets, the video edits of their affectionate moments together set to bright music. The fans point out so many things that make them right for each other that sometimes – only sometimes – he forgets whose idea it was in the first place. But he can never say that to Soobin. He knows the leader keeps tabs on trends and fan opinion too, sometimes screenshotting posts he finds funny or interesting and sending them in their Kakao group chat. But it’s not the same. When MOAs started calling Yeonjun a fox for his sharp eyes and wide smile, he embraced the comparison and wove it thoroughly into his idol persona. Fox doodles, fox stuffed animals. “Because MOAs said so,” he’d wink proudly in interviews, pointing the question back towards their fans. Why not? He’d never actually seen a fox in real life before, and he liked lots of animals – pandas, corgis. But if foxes were what they wanted, well, then he liked them as well. No harm, no foul. 

Soobin wasn’t like that. The bunny thing was a no-brainer – just look at the boy. BigHit took note quickly, and the variety show editors ate it up too. The group’s leader was nothing if not professional, letting them dress him up with stuffed carrots and face paint and cute captions. But when he didn’t feel like indulging in the lighthearted games anymore, he’d say whatever he wanted without even hesitating. 

“Raccoons! I love raccoons the most,” he proclaimed on a VLIVE once years back, eyes shining. As Yeonjun sat up in bed that night scrolling through SNS posts mourning the supposed death of the Soobin bunny agenda, the younger boy lay his head in the older’s lap and typed out fun raccoon facts on Weverse, giggling without any guilt. 

Yeonjun realizes that said bunny is still watching him, waiting for a reaction.

“So… you don’t want us to see each other at all?” he’s trying to wrap his head around what that would even look like. He’s spent almost every minute of every day for the last five years no more than 50 meters away from Soobin or any of the other members, and he’s not sure he wants to know what an alternative looks like. His whole sense of momentum requires the five of them together in one space, and _especially_ their leader. Who he loves. 

Soobin worries at his lip, the deep indentations in his cheeks quivering gently. 

Then, “I see hyung nearly every moment of every day,” the younger boy says, and Yeonjun feels a wave swell up from the pit of his stomach, filling his ears and pounding at his temples from the inside at the implication. It’s not the first time Soobin has read his mind, but hearing his own thoughts _wielded_ at him like a weapon instead of mixed into a sweet salve makes Yeonjun’s chest rattle. Soobin, who’s so good at knowing what everyone is thinking. Who takes out the fears the members don’t even want to speak aloud and holds them up to the light, doesn’t flinch, molds them into something sparkling and clean, a reason to try again tomorrow. Did he do it on purpose? 

“I… just want some space. From everything. Just to see what it’s like – what I find,” the taller boy finishes, running a hand through his thick hair. He has his determined face on, the sharp countenance he usually only wears right before an important stage. His mouth is curved almost into a scowl, but Yeonjun isn’t intimidated because he’s seen it so many times before. He’s more afraid of the words that have just come out of that mouth, the ones pinching at his bare arms with irregular, ungentle scrapes. 

“Are you sure?” Yeonjun asks lamely, and he regrets it before he’s even done with the question. Of course Soobin is sure. Soobin interrogates everything – every feeling, every impulse – with a slow and steady hand. He gropes around the contours of each blurred thing until he figures out the truth, understands exactly how it came to be. When he sets his mind on something, there’s almost never a reason to change it. The tall, dark-haired boy doesn’t even bother to give a verbal response, just looks directly into Yeonjun’s eyes. At this point, the older has bought his own delayed fight-or-flight response enough time. His mind shakes off the shock and kicks into overdrive, co-opting the fearful pounding of his heart in an attempt to drive it to power something more productive. _How to stop this? How to win him back?_

Try harder. That’s what Yeonjun’s used to. Hit the moves a bit cleaner, the runs a bit smoother. Be everything they want you to be, everything they think you are. Practice more. Not good enough? Again. Not good enough? _Again._ Not good enough?

Not good enough.

Again.

This time, he doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be. In another universe, a better version of himself gets Soobin to stay. Is exactly the right combination of nodes and crevices so that Soobin feels about Yeonjun the way Yeonjun feels about Soobin: that he can’t bear to let go. Yeonjun doesn’t know how to be that person. There’s no lesson plan, no model. Just his current self, in all the wrong shapes and sizes, and Soobin, here, saying goodbye. 

“I love you,” he blurts out. That’s all he’s got, and he knows it’s a weak attempt, knows it doesn’t make sense to throw those words out when Soobin is intent on leaving, when Soobin – for the first time in a long, long, long time – isn’t going to say them back. Still he holds his breath, wondering if maybe, just maybe, the younger will catch the phrase before it hits the ground, put it on his broad back and push it to an upright position just like he’s done for Yeonjun countless times on stage. Say something, anything, to cushion the fall. Despite himself, Yeonjun can’t help but hope for wings to sprout. 

Instead, Soobin sighs quietly. The syllables clatter to the floor, skidding across the bright white tile in all different directions. Yeonjun winces. 

“Yeah. I’ll see you in a month, hyung,” the boy reaches out a hand and grabs Yeonjun’s upper arm, gives it a gentle squeeze, then picks up his duffel bag and turns the corner towards the staircase, pushing through the door without looking back. When it slams shut, Yeonjun looks up and down the hallway usually bustling with staff members and artists, rubbing the phantom spot of brief warmth on his bicep. He’s alone. 

The next few days are a blur. Hueningkai leaves for China to see his dad, hoping for praise and approval from a man who feels much further away than the five hour plane ride from Seoul to Beijing; Beomgyu finally gets to go back to Daegu and spend time with his parents who he so dearly misses. Taehyun tags along to the southern city. It’s been a long time since the older maknae has gone home, even though his parents live in the heart of Seoul. He’s not sure what to say to them after all this time, afraid of how little he feels he knows or needs them, so he opts to spend the first part of the break with Beomgyu’s family instead. Yeonjun’s aunt has been asking _his_ family to visit the U.S. for ages, and when his mom brings it up again at dinner he surprises both his parents by agreeing before she even finishes her question. 

“Yeah,” he says, putting down his chopsticks a bit too hard and rattling the table. The cozy kitchen table, where it was only ever the three of them. “Yeah, let’s go.” 

//

The same night that Bang PD told them about the break, the boys had run out to the store and bought five boxes of black hair dye, stripping to their underwear in the dorm and helping each other rub the inky chemicals into their roots. The bathroom looked like a kid’s calligraphy class gone horribly wrong, dark droplets splattered all over the less-than-pristine porcelain. Music blasted while they painted over the bright colors left over from their last comeback, pretending that reverting their hair to its original shade would also erase years of structural damage to their roots and ends. Taehyun, perhaps reminded of his trainee self, clung to Yeonjun’s back as a rattling, breathy laugh ricocheted from the back of the older boy’s throat and out his lips. Beomgyu shrieking and grabbing his toothbrush out of harm’s way as Hueningkai washed out the dye and shook his wet head, spraying them all with diluted drops of grey that would stain for a few more days. Soobin smiling his big, toothy smile as he kicked around the dorm and flapped his bent arms dramatically to the songs playing through the speakers. At the end of it all they collapsed in the living room, five dark-haired boys with their limbs strewn over each other, heads in laps and legs straight out at unpredictable angles like the hands of a clock when you look up after hours in the practice studio. Each of them thinking about going _home_ , an enigma both exciting and frightening after all these years.

Yeonjun isn’t home. He’s here in a foreign country, smelling of coffee beans and mowed grass on big suburban lawns, checking his phone even though it’s three in the morning in South Korea and the group chat with the members has been silent for two days. The last messages were a video from Beomgyu of Taehyun fighting with Toto and a few laughing emoji stickers in response. He brushes his hair to the side and catches the end of his bangs between his thumb and index finger, feeling how dried and coarse the strands still are. 

“Hey, can you gather all the glasses? I’m gonna start the dishwasher since it’s a slow day,” Yeonjun’s younger cousin interrupts his slow descent into moping. She usually speaks to him in English and never uses honorifics, treats the term _oppa_ like it’s a dirty word even when she does use Korean, which is _fine,_ he supposes.

“Mmm,” he nods his assent, looking around the cafe. There are a few coasters and cups stacked above the trash bin as well as various glasses with the final remaining dregs left behind on tables throughout the cafe. The girl, Alice, has finished her drink, light refracting through the empty glass and scattering lazily on the floor next to the table where she’s sitting. She’s got a laptop open in front of her but has been scribbling on a notebook for so long that the screen has gone dark. Yeonjun maneuvers around the counter, planning out in his head the best route around the cafe to pick up and stack all the glassware in one trip. After hitting a few tables he turns toward the side window only to see that the previously occupied chair is empty, the laptop closed. She’s nowhere to be seen. Looking around, the boy walks over to her table and peers at the notebook left open. 

It’s covered in symbols, formulas, shapes with wild vectors chasing each other around the page. He swears some of it looks kind of familiar, the mathematical expressions tickling some deep recess of his brain from when he sat for the CSAT. He’d done it for his mother’s sake, then; after four years of him being a trainee without any idea of when he would debut, her concern had started to grow. He’d spent the majority of his free time in high school singing and dancing, which meant significantly less time studying. If he couldn’t be a successful idol, a degree at a good college seemed less and less likely, and his mom worried that she had allowed her only son to run too fast and too far down a path that would not lead to reward. So Yeonjun had buckled down, losing even more sleep to finish practice workbooks and review packets right before the exam, hiding out in some unused room the size of a closet and sustaining himself on convenience store energy drinks that Soobin would drop off before heading back to the dorms. When the results came back he hardly even registered the number – it wasn’t stellar by any means, but he’d done better than he’d expected. His mom had been pleased, though she tried not to seem too enthusiastic on the phone for fear of casting any shadows on the insistent glow of her son’s still-vibrant idol dreams. It hardly mattered to Yeonjun because he didn’t even know what he’d do with the score. He had no idea what school he’d want to go to, what major he’d want to pursue. He wanted to debut. Thinking of being anything else only made him realize how badly he wanted to be an idol, and the strength of that desire – and everything it had led him to do, and not do – filled him with a deep, murky fear. There were no other options, as far as he was concerned. There couldn’t be.

The chair in front of him scrapes backwards as Alice scoots around him to sit back down. Yeonjun doesn’t know how long he’s been staring at her things, caught up in memories blurry at the edges of Hanja characters swimming across the page in an unfamiliar testing room. He jumps back. 

“Ah, 갑자기...”

“Sorry?” Alice looks up at him not unkindly despite having just caught him snooping.

“N-nothing, I just – are you finished?” he gestures at her cup and the empty plastic packets and napkins crumpled into a somewhat neat pile at the end of the table.

“Oh, yes,” she scoots forward to help him gather the trash. Yeonjun’s outstretched right hand hangs still along with the air between them.

“Are you a student around here?” Alice asks as she places the bundle into his palm. She doesn’t make eye contact. Yeonjun shoves it into his apron pocket, feeling the plastic expand lightly against his thigh.

On the long flight from Seoul to the States, Yeonjun had wondered if he ought to make up a backstory for himself. His aunt’s family knew, of course, that he was an idol. But BigHit had impressed strongly on all the members the need for discretion, warning them that the company could only do so much to protect them when they were out on their own time and that their actions could still have an impact on their group, their families, and their fans. There had been enough horror stories. Yeonjun tried to imagine what could have been as the lights on the plane dimmed to indicate that it was evening in some time zone at least, if not the one they were currently flying through. He’d often said he wanted to be a cartoonist, since he’d liked drawing as a kid, but that wasn’t the most realistic or low-profile persona. Also, he didn’t actually draw anymore. In another life, Yeonjun is just a college student nearing graduation. What is he studying? What is it exactly that he wants to do?

“No, I live in South Korea – I study psychology, there.” It’s not what he’d practiced on the plane, but it sounds right when it comes out somehow. A voice from his memory echoes, _if I wasn’t a singer I would be a therapist,_ the hard _th_ bouncing off the back wall of his brain. 

“Psychology, that’s cool! Do you live in Seoul? What are you doing here then?” She looks up finally, and her eyes meet Yeonjun’s. He didn’t think this far but he has no choice.

“Yes, I live in Seoul. I’m here for the summer, with my aunt. She owns the cafe.”

“Ah, neat,” she says. “Do you like it here?” Her native English has a clear quality to it, a door swinging open to reveal a brightly lit but empty room. 

“Yes, it’s great,” Yeonjun only slightly forces a smile, drawing an amused look from the girl seated before him. He nods at the notepad. “What are you working on?” 

Alice fumbles with the book, angling it towards him as if that would help him decipher what’s on the page.

“I’m a physics teacher – or at least, I will be soon.” A flash of a giggle. “I just graduated with my masters in education, and I start at a new school in the fall. With high schoolers. Obviously there’s a set curriculum already but I’m brainstorming lesson plans, different ways to teach these topics – you know, like Newton, free-body diagrams and all. Real throwback, right?” She’s animated now, expecting some kind of connection with Yeonjun as she points her pen at a drawing of two squares colliding, arrows – _forces_ , he realizes – sketched parallel and perpendicular around them. It is familiar, actually, now that he thinks about it. 

“Yes, I remember,” he says, only half lying, matching the warmth in her eyes and then some. “Are you teaching at Montgomery high school?” They had recently hung his cousin’s diploma from the local school above the fireplace at her graduation party.

“Montgomery…? Oh, no,” Alice says, shaking her head slightly. “I don’t live around here, I’m just in town for the weekend… it’s my first time, actually. Just visiting. I’m from –” she says the name of another town, or maybe it’s a county, or a state, that Yeonjun’s never heard of. 

“Why are you here then?” he asks, finally setting down the stack of plates he’d had balanced between his left arm and his hip on an unoccupied part of the small table. His cousin can wait a bit. Alice’s face falls a bit as she watches them settle into place, the question stalling in the air momentarily.

“I’m... here for a wedding. Not mine, but a friend, a really good friend, is getting married,” she says. Hesitates. The plates rattle as she taps one finger against the notepad with increasing force. Yeonjun waits. “Someone I love – loved.” The last part comes out in a rush, her lips twisting closed quickly after. “Sorry,” she chuckles, embarrassed. “I don’t know why I said that. TMI?”

“Don’t be sorry,” Yeonjun says charmingly, and Alice flashes a small but grateful smile.

“Well, what about you?” she asks, eager to change the subject as she leans forward to clear some of her things off the table. Yeonjun takes the hint and slides into the empty chair across from her. “Were you born and raised in Korea? Why come here for the summer?” 

Yeonjun nods. “I’m Korean, but I lived for two years in San Jose.”

“Mmm,” Alice hums in acknowledgment but doesn’t say anything, sensing that there’s more.

“I came to stay with my aunt because…” because what? “Because I love someone, too.” 

Alice breaks into a larger smile, grateful for the juicy distraction.

“Yeah? That’s cute,” Yeonjun gets a glimpse of her front teeth. Straight. “Are they here then, in the U.S? How did you guys meet? Ooh, tell me more. Wait – what’s your name?” 

Yeonjun can’t help but laugh. As daunting as those questions are, it’s been a while since he’s had a conversation with someone new, someone who has absolutely no idea who he is.

“I’m Yeonjun.”

“Yeon – jun,” she says, curling her tongue around the syllables. Pretty close. “Okay, Yeonjun. So tell me more about this person of yours. I’m tired of working, anyway.” She closes the notebook and clicks her pen closed.

“We… we were friends first. Well, sort of.” 

//

On Soobin’s first day at BigHit, the other trainees had walked into the dance studio for their daily lesson to find a new boy sitting on a chair at the front of the studio, long arms even then encircling the brand new backpack on his lap and pulling it close to his chest as both of his legs bounced in jerky ups and downs. Black hair, freshly cut somewhere between a bowl and the shaggy bangs the arts school kids liked these days. After the staff member had given a brief introduction, Soobin had stood up rather suddenly, sliding his backpack to the floor. 

“Hello, I’m Soobin,” he said, going around the boys who’d been sitting clustered together, bowing slightly as he tried to gauge their ages, trying to see if he could preemptively place the ‘hyungs’ in the right place. When a trainee said his name back, Soobin would nod, smiling just full enough for one dimple to appear, and repeat it. Like a businessman, almost. He’d looked sure of himself, ready, although later Yeonjun would learn that it was just an act. He bowed back at an acute angle when the younger boy approached him, telling him his name and birth year. New boys came almost every week, and left with varying frequency. BigHit wasn’t an easy place to be a trainee, though in a different way from other entertainment companies. Yeonjun liked the others well enough, ate together and watched TV in the dorm room and got along fine, but something inside him was still a bit wary about making friends. All of this wouldn’t matter anymore once he debuted; would just be stories, anecdotes. Footage carefully edited. The people he’d be in a group with, they were the ones who were going to matter. In fact, Yeonjun felt it would almost be better to wait until the group was confirmed – that way their future wouldn’t be too entrenched with memories of other people, people who weren’t around anymore, people who’d left or been left behind. No room for any more ghosts, so to say. Not in his heart. At least, that’s what he told himself so he didn’t feel like so much of a jerk for not trying to get too close with many of the boys despite sharing a small room with five of them and three shower stalls with the remaining who-knows-how-many. Soobin passed on, and Yeonjun turned his attention to the dance teacher as the lesson began, emptying his mind so he could focus on learning the new choreography. Later on, after the lesson was over and Yeonjun had put in another hour alone in a smaller studio, he was reminded of the new arrival running into him in the hallway as he left the bathroom.

“Ah, Yeonjun-hyung, erm,” the narrow corners of Soobin’s mouth turned up in a tight smile, quickly masking the lost look he’d been wearing just a moment before. “Hello, you’ve worked hard today.”

“Right. First day okay, then?” the older boy slipped into banmal easily, as was his right, even though they didn’t even know each other. It’s a habit he picked up from the other boys, many of whom had siblings and were used to pulling hyung privilege on younger trainees as early and as often as possible to hide the fact that they too felt like children inside.

“Oh… yes, good! The choreography lesson was fascinating. I think… I have a lot to learn. You looked really cool, hyung, dancing at the front near the mirror. You look like a real center.”

Yeonjun smiled lightly. Nice of him. “I’ve been training for a while, so. Has your mom called worried about you yet?”

“Oh,” the younger boy’s lips flew into a perfect circle, aspirating the end of the syllable as a deep indentation showed itself on his left cheek. “We just talked on the phone – how did you know?”

“Always happens,” Yeonjun said, grinning again. “First day of mysterious trainee camp, living on your own when you don’t know how to cook, take the bus, do laundry – of course they’re worried.”

“Yeah,” Soobin nodded eagerly, his smile larger than it’d been all day so that Yeonjun could see a shadow of _another_ dimple peeking through the right side of the boy’s face. “I mean, I can do my laundry, in theory. I’ve done it once before. At least once before. It’s just that my mom always picks it up from my room when she’s doing hers, you know. Really it’s because it’s just easier that way, because it all fits into one load. Saves money. And water! ...She’s good though, she and my dad went to the park today and my older sister said she did really good on her exam at university, she’s really smart, and they ate kimbap for dinner but my dog kept sitting next to where I usually sit at meals because I’m the one who always feeds him under the table so I guess he can’t get any scraps now, which is sad, but he kind of needs to lose weight anyway so I think it’s okay. His name is Sean and he’s four, by the way,” even though Yeonjun hadn’t asked. Soobin pauses for a breath. “We talked for a long time. That’s why I’m late to the showers. What about you, Yeonjun-hyung? Were you talking to your parents too?”

“I was at the dance studio, practicing.” Yeonjun hadn’t talked to his mom on the phone in three weeks, actually. “I’m... working on my own choreo. I want to show the staff at the next monthly evaluations that I can do it. I’ve been trying to get better at freestyling, watching a lot of videos of our sunbaes, and some of the moves actually work out really nicely so I’m putting them together bit by bit.”

“Wow,” Soobin looked breathless, his already shiny pupils glistening a bit harder. “That’s _cool,_ hyung. “F-ree-sty-le,” the boy savored the letters, pursing his pink lips around the last syllable. He nodded to himself and went silent but made no indication of moving past the older or ending the conversation. The few seconds of silence between them started skirting around the edges of awkward. Yeonjun coughed lightly.

“Well,” he said, remembering that he was still dripping onto the wooden floor, angling his body to keep walking towards the bedrooms. 

“Ah!” Soobin’s words burst out with stored momentum, catching both of them by some surprise. “If hyung needs someone to film his dancing, I could do that. That way you can go back and monitor, from different angles and heights. It’ll help you remember better, for the choreography.” His eyes searched the older boy’s face. They were about the same height, then. Yeonjun hadn’t planned on showing anybody what he was working on – there were other boys working on solo pieces too, and he didn’t want to influence or be influenced by them. He wanted to be unique. The eagerness spanning broadly across Soobin’s soft cheeks looked like the morning sun in spring. It’d been a while since Yeonjun had spent a lot of time outside.

“Sure, Soobin – I’ll let you know sometime.”

“Nice!” That second dimple winked out at him even harder. “Nice. Okay hyung, good night. You’ve worked hard today,” again, a bow, and the younger boy continued on towards the bathroom, fingers trailing along the white plaster wall, slippers swiping audibly across the floor. 

As the elder walked away he considered that even with no training yet, Soobin would make a good idol. _He’s someone people will fall in love with easy,_ Yeonjun thought to himself, running his fingers through his damp black hair.

//

“We went through a lot together. And after a few years, I realized I loved… was in love. With him.” Yeonjun refuses to think about the huge admission he’s just made, a glowing ember he’s never even allowed himself to look at directly. “He’s not here, he’s in Seoul.” He sees the slight confusion on the girl’s face at the narrative and decides to continue; he’s already said the most monumental thing, so why not finish the story completely with its singed ending. “He wanted… a break. Or something.” He’s twisting his fingers together, the metal of his two thick rings scraping against each other. “So I ran here, for the summer.” 

Alice’s eyebrows furrow. “That’s tough, man,” she says. “Um,” she looks at his hands. “Do you wanna talk about it more?” 

Does he? Yeonjun doesn’t know. He has so much to say that he can’t say because if he says it it’ll be real, the hurt and the longing and the love. And he doesn’t want to risk finally holding something in his hands just to have it snatched away immediately. At the same time he hasn’t told a single person about this, even though it’s been about the only thing on his mind since he left Seoul, and feels like he may burst if it goes on for much longer. Unsure, he stays silent for once. 

“Okay,” Alice rushes to fill the space empathetically. “Okay, well… love is hard, you know. It’s weird. Sometimes you love someone and it feels like the only way the world can possibly exist. Like, natural. Just right. I mean… until it’s not.”

_Until it’s not._ Yeonjun gets that. All the times he thought the world might end, it had not ended. The ground had shaken, even tilted a bit, but they’d all been able to stay standing. Together. When he thinks about that last goodbye, he feels something once solid under his feet begin to crumble away.

“That probably didn’t help,” Alice looks sheepish, embarrassed, and Yeonjun realizes belatedly that this girl who holds the actual truth about him and Soobin is a complete _stranger_ – she doesn’t know anything else about him (nor he her). Except, of course, this one incredibly important thing. Then again, he’s used to strangers. Thousands – millions – of people around the world who he’ll never meet have some idea of him already in their heads. Love him, or hate him; know and say and feel things about him that he’ll never be privy to, never have control over. What’s one more person? Maybe everything there is to _really_ know about him is right here in these words, anyway. He takes a breath.

“I have no idea how to live without him,” the words tumble out of Yeonjun’s mouth, grasp at the air, try to get used to a new life of free-fall. The girl’s eyes widen slightly but she says nothing, just waits. “For the longest time I thought… I did the right things, was in the right place at the right time, and ended up doing what I loved and having people love me for it. And I thought as long as I kept working hard and doing my best, good things would keep happening.” The hours he’s spent in the practice rooms, the diets and sore shoulders and missed calls. “But I realized later that all the good I did, was only because of him. I couldn’t have done any of it if he wasn’t next to me – he brought out the best in me, made me believe I could be what he thought I was, what he wanted for me. And so I was. But really, it was him this whole time. And now… it’s nothing. It’s not… I’m nothing,” Yeonjun trails off, eyes boring a hole into the table. He doesn’t know if anything he’s just said makes sense, but he also isn’t sure if he wants it to make sense. It sounds a bit pathetic, even to him, how much he needs Soobin. How lost, how undefined he feels without the younger boy like a constant hand supporting his back. But he knows without a doubt that it’s true. He exhales. “Just a mess.”

At the top of his vision he sees Alice lean backwards, biting her lip. 

“A mess,” she repeats. “Yeah.” Yeonjun spies leftover crumbs scattered over his side of the table and sweeps them up, using his right hand to brush them into a small pile that he then pushes off the edge of the table into his waiting left palm. He pockets the handful. Alice watches him clean, sliding her eyes over the slightly-worn table as he focuses on gathering every piece. Her gaze comes to rest on the stack of textbooks and teaching guides sitting to her right. She looks back up at Yeonjun.

“It feels like chaos, right?”

_Chaos._ The word conjures up scenes from a superhero movie, explosions in space and collapsing buildings and multithreaded battle sequences. It’s not a word he uses very often, but it does feel right. Like everything inside him at war without even knowing what victory is supposed to look like. Hoping, praying, to whoever’s out there that it’s not this.

“Chaos.”

Alice reaches for one of the hardcovers, rifles through it until she finds the right section and turns the book around to face him.

“There’s a rule of nature, you know,” she splays her hand across the pages to press them down. “Entropy – fancy word for disorder – always increases. Everything in the universe is getting more and more disordered. Always.” She taps at a few diagrams, simple drawings of molecules breaking apart and moving away from each other, scattering through space unaware of how blessed they are to have mathematical equations making sense of their repellent trajectories. One figure catches Yeonjun’s eye.

“That doesn’t look like disorder,” he points at a set of two pictures. In the first, circles of different colors float randomly; in the next, they’ve combined into clusters, the pinks with the blacks and the blues with the yellows.

Alice follows Yeonjun’s finger and grins.

“Ah,” she clicks her pen a few times. “You’d think so, right? Don’t they look happy together?” she taps at the diagram, the exposed ballpoint leaving tiny jet streaks across the printed picture. “Under certain conditions, something like this might happen where the system looks more ordered. But actually, the rule still applies. The amount of energy that’s released when these molecules come together is large, and it makes the _surroundings_ more disordered. Even though they seem calmer, everything around them has become more chaotic, more messy. You can’t always see it, but the entropy still increases.” Alice draws light squiggles in the empty space left behind by the tightly-bound molecules. “You can measure it in certain ways; heat, light, noise, and the math proves it, too. It’s how it always works.”

Yeonjun thinks about the madness that is idol life. Every comeback season – show up to a broadcast station running on four hours of sleep, monitor pre-recordings with a eye trained to spot your own failings while PD-nims hand you last-minute scripts and requests for aegyo as the makeup artist touches up the concealer sweating off your face and a stylist hacks together a better way for your shirt to not go flying during the choreography. Touring, traveling; hotel rooms that blur into one wide swath of beige. In the busiest times he can barely process what’s happening, feels like he’s half asleep and floating two meters above his body even as he watches himself performing and recording variety shows and playing on Weverse. And yet, that’s also when some of the best moments happen. A comforting arm around Yeonjun’s waist unprompted, when he needs it the most. A stray compliment spoken with starry eyes that imprints into his brain for weeks. In the moments when he feels like he might truly drift away, Soobin is the one who makes him feel like he can stand on his own two feet, more sure of who and where he is than he could ever be on his own. Amidst it all, something that looked and felt like order. 

Which came first? Was this world they’d worked so hard for so wild and unpredictable that he and Soobin simply had to be, gravitating ever closer to each other in a confined space that birthed an inevitable need? Or was the tether between the two boys so firm that its ever-tautening somehow disrupted everything in its wake, caused increasing ripples and waves even as they taught each other how to float? 

//

Here was another story: two and a half years into their career, the boys hit a wall. At that point they were used to having delayed comebacks, whether for unforeseen personal or public health issues or schedule conflicts with company seniors and juniors; it had almost become a running joke in BigHit that the group’s schedule was carved in low-tide sand rather than stone. But this time was different: the comeback wasn’t being delayed because of logistics but because the members themselves weren’t ready. The choreography wasn’t significantly harder than anything they’d done in the past; yet despite numerous all-nighters practicing, they still couldn’t get it right. Beomgyu and Yeonjun were working on two songs together and kept butting heads, their tension spilling over from the recording studio to the company car to the dorms. Soobin had talked to both of them separately and together but even the leader was unable to facilitate a breakthrough. Both boys felt so strongly about what they had created, held the melodies and lyrics so close to their chests that to suggest compromise or deference was to negate some crystallized part of their very selves. No one dared to utter the word _slump,_ but it hung like a heavy fog over the boys wherever they went. It all came to a head in a stern meeting with Bang Si-hyuk, one of those I’m-not-mad-I’m-just-disappointed talks except actually Bang PD _was_ mad, in addition to being disappointed, since there were thousands of hours and thousands of dollars of preparation going into each comeback. He told Beomgyu and Yeonjun that they were being prideful and selfish, accusations that stung the boys all the more because they were true. Taehyun and Huening looked at the table as the older man spoke. Soobin watched the exchange quietly. Then Bang turned to him.

“And Soobin-ssi... I know Yeonjun is your hyung, but to be quite frank, you need to do better. It’s not fun and games here. A leader can’t always be liked, you know. Sometimes you have to do what’s right for the team, even if it hurts you or someone else. If they _really_ care about the good of the group,” here their CEO shot a pointed look at the rest of the members seated around the conference table, “they’ll know you’re doing the right thing and suck it up eventually. I thought you understood that, Soobin, thought you could do what this role requires. I can’t even begin to tell you how much trouble this has all caused, not to mention money. We, the PDs, the choreographers, could have just overridden you all – scrapped the songs you wrote that needed work, forced you to go with the concepts we came up with, and made the comeback happen. We didn’t, because this was your chance to really own the music. But it seems like that was a mistake.” Bang PD looked around the room, then turned back to look at Soobin directly. “I don’t like being proven wrong in this way. You’re all young men now. Adults. There is no place for me or any of the other staff to have to step in to resolve these things. That’s what you’re here for, that’s what your members and the rest of us need from you. Being a leader doesn’t get easier over time – look at any of your sunbaes. They’ll tell you. You need to learn. You need to do better. If you don’t grow, you’ll fall.”

To his credit, Soobin had maintained eye contact for the entire speech. He hid the wavering of his watery pupils carefully, chest rising and falling slowly with his measured breaths, mouth stiff and still as a dried flower. Yeonjun didn’t know how the younger boy did it – he himself couldn’t sit up straight under the weight of those words, and they weren’t even directed at him. Beomgyu was pale. Taehyun stared at a spot a meter to the left of Bang PD’s head, and Huening looked like he might pass out.

“No more working tonight. The van back to the dorm is waiting downstairs. You’re all dismissed,” Bang rubbed his forehead with two fingers. The boys rose as he did, waiting for him to leave the room. The car ride back was dead silent, and only when Yeonjun emerged from his room an hour after they got home did he realize Soobin wasn’t even in the apartment. 

“I don’t know where he is,” Beomgyu shrugged, eyes burning a hole into the dining room table.

“You’re his roommate –” Yeonjun felt the exacerbation of the past day, the past weeks, bubbling inside him, and he stopped himself. Beomgyu prickled at the tone and turned around to meet Yeonjun’s gaze with fire, never one to back down from a fight. Hueningkai didn’t look up from his phone, pretending like always that he wasn’t listening, but they all noticed how he tensed up, shoulders shooting to his ears and back hunching as if a defensive physical position would protect him in a shouting match. Yeonjun sighed. “Sorry,” he said, looking straight at Beomgyu. “Sorry. It’s not your fault. I’ll go… look for him.” Beomgyu’s dark eyes dimmed, softened just a shade, and he nodded. They pretended not to hear Hueningkai’s shaky exhale.

He finds Soobin in the laundry room, in the back of the apartment building. The members almost never come down here, since they have their own in-unit machines for privacy reasons. Yeonjun barely even remembers that this area exists, was just passing it on his way to the back alley exit when he noticed a tall lump of fabric sitting in the corner.

“Soobin,” Yeonjun says softly, tapping his fingers against the door to announce his entrance. The younger boy looks up, and his expression is not quite one of relief when he sees who it is.

“Hi, hyung,” he brushes back his hair from his glistening eyes, accidentally pushing down the hood that was covering his head at the same time. 

“Soobin… I’m sorry,” Yeonjun kneels next to his leader. “We shouldn’t have been fighting like that. Bang PD was right, we were being dumb and we messed it up for everyone. But we can fix it, we’ll go into the studio tomorrow and finish the songs. No more butting heads. Really, I think it’ll be okay. After that it’s just dance practice, and we’ve done that before, we can make this next deadline.” Yeonjun puts his hand out and tugs at Soobin’s arms, folded across his chest. The younger boy doesn’t assent. It’s quiet for a while, and Yeonjun doesn’t know how to let the silence settle, so he keeps going: “Look, I think this album is going to do really well. I know it. We’re putting a lot into it, and MOAs will really love it. The photos already turned out so good, and the concept for the music video looks great. I feel like we might get an All-Kill with the title track, seriously, and the streams –” 

“Hyung.” Soobin’s voice slides through Yeonjun’s rambling like a sudden breeze. Soobin looks at him with tired, honest eyes. “Bang PD _was_ right. I wasn’t doing my job as a leader. It’s not just about you and Beomgyu. Everyone’s got something going on right now. I didn’t pull through when you all needed it, and now we’re here.” The leader leans his head back against a washing machine, its idle thrum reverberating in his spine. 

“What? No, no that’s not true,” Yeonjun hears a keen of desperation, unbidden, in his own voice. “No, you’re a great leader Soobin, you’re the best – I don’t think you could have done anything differently, Beomgyu and I are such idiots and we wouldn’t listen; it wasn’t your fault, seriously, don’t be upset, I –”

“Yeonjun _hyung_ ,” Soobin cuts him off again, but this time his voice and his gaze are sharper, rush of wind. He looks at the older boy seriously, with a shade of – disappointment? That Yeonjun’s never seen before, and sighs. “I know you’re trying to help me, and I appreciate it. But just because you want something to be true… doesn’t mean it will be. I know it’s always worked for you.” He pauses, bringing his hands down into his lap. “But maybe it would be better if I were alone right now.”

Yeonjun’s stomach drops, and now he feels like he’s the one who’s going to start crying. But he can’t, because he knows if he does that Soobin will start comforting _him,_ telling him that it’s okay and that he’s doing his best even though his best clearly isn’t working right now, giving him the words he needs to hear even though he can’t seem to do the same for the younger. He’s afraid to mess up any more than he already has, so he just nods. Soobin reaches out and puts his hand on the back of Yeonjun’s head, ruffling his hair and massaging his scalp gently with long fingers, then rests his hand briefly on the back of Yeonjun’s neck with a reassuring weight to send him off before closing his eyes and leaning back again. Yeonjun stands. Yeonjun goes. 

//

“Do you believe in fate then?” Yeonjun asks Alice, shaking his head to clear the memories crowding his temples. He gestures with one hand at the book and waves the other in the air, not knowing how to put his thoughts into words but hoping she understands the connection between the two ideas. Alice purses her lips, taking the question seriously, but then shrugs in honest uncertainty.

“Fate? I don’t know – that’s metaphysics. Or religion. Neither of which are my area of expertise,” she says. “But I get what you mean. I do find it comforting that something out there is dictating what’s got to happen, in a way. That someone, or something else, is pulling the strings, y’know? Even if those strings are just molecules and bonds and forces, or whatever, with no hidden agenda or sense of right and wrong. Still, life’s got its own rules – what you think is right, what you think ought to happen, has to happen… sometimes the universe has its own ideas, and it’s been following them for centuries. And who are we to argue? It’s kind of nice to know that we’re not the ones wholly in charge of the equations. We just put in what we can... and see what comes out.” She closes the textbook slowly and seems like she’s going to say more, mirroring the thoughtful look on Yeonjun’s face, but they’re interrupted by the buzz of a cell phone. Alice reaches out and grabs the face-down device, tapping at the screen to read the notifications with an unreadable expression.

“I’ve got to go,” she says, grabbing at her scattered pencils and sheets of paper. “Rehearsal dinner,” she gives Yeonjun a wry grin, but it quivers just a bit at the sides. “I’m giving a speech and everything.” She stands abruptly, pushing the table forward a bit so that the dishes rattle and stuffing the rest of her books into her backpack before swinging it over her shoulder forcefully. Yeonjun’s head is still declouding, and he doesn’t know what to say. 

Alice stops her rather hectic series of movements and reaches out to give Yeonjun’s shoulder a hesitant pat, her hand so light it feels like it’s not even there. 

“Hey,” she says. “Good luck with your... thing.” The girl bites her lip, stilling herself. “You know, humans have been messing with the order of the universe for as long as we can. When something doesn’t work the way we want, we figure out how to bend the rules, rig the equations. Sometimes we get what we want when we want it badly enough, and sometimes the world knocks us on our ass and reminds us that sheer will only goes so far. Maybe you call that fate.” She shrugs again. “Well, it was nice to meet you.” 

Yeonjun stands. He’s used to fleeting moments of connection, faceless names, nameless faces, but suddenly he feels like he’s on the outside looking in. 

“Good luck to you too,” he blurts out. “Fighting,” he raises his right fist, putting an American accent on the word without any hint of irony. Alice laughs.

“Fighting, indeed,” she says, with some familiarity. “Bye, Yeon-jun.” She waves, and then she’s gone, the door of the cafe chiming on her way out. Yeonjun turns back towards the table, worn but spotless except for the pile of dishes still waiting to be washed. He picks up the stack and walks back to the kitchen. 

A month before their break, Soobin was in Yeonjun’s room while the younger members were out to dinner. It was the first sweltering evening of summer, and the boys lay on far sides of the small bed to keep their respective body heat to themselves even as the air condition awakened from its slumber and got to work. 

“Hyung,” Soobin said, and Yeonjun turned his neck to look at the younger boy. “Do you think we’d be this close to each other, if this weren’t our job? If we’d met under different circumstances, I mean.”

Yeonjun’s first reaction was _yes, of course,_ because to be honest, he couldn’t imagine a life where he didn’t know Soobin. He did believe in fate, some amorphous propelling force in the world, or at least he thought he did, but he didn’t often use his spare brainpower to think about alternate possibilities or scenarios, especially not ones that seemed less ideal than what he had now. Yeonjun wanted to say yes, but one look at Soobin’s face told him that wasn’t quite what the other was thinking; knowing Soobin, he probably had a good reason. So the older boy just shrugged awkwardly, slightly sticky shoulders moving against the fabric of his t-shirt to reach his ears. 

“We’re pretty different, you know?” Soobin continued thoughtfully, and as he did he reached out his left hand to grab Yeonjun’s right, longer fingers intertwining and running over his blunt-cut nails. 

Yeonjun knew they’d both seen enough romantic comedies to be well-familiar with the idea that opposites attract, but he wasn’t sure what Soobin was getting at. Something grey and moth-like fluttered uncomfortably in the dark of his stomach.

“So you think we wouldn’t be together like this if we didn’t have to be?” The question came out blunter than he intended, but Soobin wasn’t fazed, his thumb continuing to rub against the back of Yeonjun’s hand in firm ellipses.

“Well no, not necessarily. But think about it – if we were at university, assuming we actually went to the same university, we might never run into each other in all four years. We’d major in different things. If it were in Seoul I’d probably live at home, or with my sister, to save money. You’d be on the dance team and I’d be… maybe tutoring, or working part-time or something. Keeping to myself. We wouldn’t have anything in common, so it’s possible we’d just never cross paths, you know?” Yeonjun could tell Soobin had considered this before, probably walked through specific scenarios in his head to reach this conclusion. It did make sense, realistically speaking, but Yeonjun has never felt too realistic when he’s with Soobin. 

“Maybe we’d be on different parts of the campus a lot – but that doesn’t mean we’d never meet.” Yeonjun shifted to turn his gaze up at the ceiling, taking his turn to dive into unfamiliar waters of speculation. “Like at a club?” He didn’t have to look at Soobin to know the look on his face as the younger boy snorted softly. “Or just a house party. Some rich kid on the dance team whose parents are paying for a big apartment that overlooks the Han river. You’re friends with a friend of someone who’s invited, so you show up because you don’t have that much homework to do that weekend and you want to try at least one college party. I’m hanging out by the kitchen two drinks in, and music is playing. When you walk in, our eyes meet across the room even though there are like thirty people dancing in the living room between us, all crowded together in the dark with no space in between. Then we end up talking, become friends. Even if we don’t have school stuff in common, I think we’d still get along and find things we love – like – about each other.” Yeonjun pictured it in his mind: shoulders huddled together in the dark on a sofa pushed back against the corner of the room; a cup of suspiciously clear liquid illuminated by flashing lights as it passed between grasping hands; shy smiles breaking into bolder nudges as something thrumming and electric circled the two of them with ever-increasing intensity. The thought of it made a shiver run up Yeonjun’s back, a comfortable whisper from another life, but when it reached the middle of his shoulder blades the pleasant thrill suddenly turned to something more akin to pain – an accusation. The pinch caught the breath in his throat and spread across his upper back, causing his right arm to flex subconsciously. His grip tightened urgently around Soobin’s fingers even as he tried to stop himself and breathe away the sensation. The younger boy looked over, slightly-open mouth tinged with concern for Yeonjun’s recurring back pain, but any question died on his tongue when he saw Yeonjun’s pursed lips and the way the older boy’s eyes continued to fix stubbornly on the ceiling. 

“I guess you’re right, hyung,” Soobin said after a silence, round eyes meandering across the room as he slipped himself easily into the scenario that Yeonjun had painted for the two of them. His right arm lifted off the bed slightly and the fingers of his free hand curled into a loose C-shape, as if holding an invisible plastic cup of alcohol that some stranger had just poured for him. “We are different, but we love each other now. Maybe we could love each other anywhere, even if we hadn’t gone through all of this. Even if I was a quiet psychology major and you were the cool captain of the campus dance team.” Soobin chuckled, as did Yeonjun, but when they stopped the imaginary cup felt heavier than anything, heavier than a microphone or the weights the BigHit trainer forced them to lift on a biweekly basis. Filled to the brim with something they could never drink. 

_Bam!_ From the bedroom the boys heard the front door of the dorm slam open as the younger members returned from dinner, chatting boisterously about how Hueningkai had knocked over the display at the neighboring convenience store on the way home. There wasn’t much time left, the center of gravity in the apartment shifting to accommodate the five of them once again. Yeonjun tried to calm his heart from the light fluttering that had started up at Soobin’s words, the quiet declaration of love fresh every time.

“I’d have to be the one to make the first move, though,” he put on a cheeky grin, finally turning to make eye contact with Soobin once again.

The leader met his eyes briefly, warmly, then swung the bottom half of his body off of the bed as the sound of the other boys got closer to the bedrooms.

“Don’t be so sure of that, hyung,” he gave Yeonjun’s hand a final squeeze before letting go and hoisting his tall frame out of the room, closing the door gently behind him. Yeonjun’s fingers curled inwards to press into his palm, resenting the empty space immediately but holding on to a memory of fullness and touch for as long as possible. 

Once Yeonjun’s done loading the dishwasher, he goes back out to the front counter and stands at the cash register. There’s usually a rush after 5 PM, people stopping by on their way home from work to pick up whatever sweets remain in the wire baskets at the front of the cafe. He checks the clock: 4:50 PM. His brain jumps ahead to Seoul time automatically, closing the 14-hour distance in a single step. Almost 7 in the morning. He wonders briefly if Soobin might be waking up around now, then laughs to himself. As if their leader didn’t sleep in until almost noon on the days when they _did_ have schedules. He checks his phone again – no messages. Impulsively, he opens up his chat with Soobin.

They hadn’t talked since the younger had gone back to Ansan. Well, except for one lame attempt wherein Yeonjun, still panicking over what a “break” meant, had sent Soobin a picture of his hair gel and some single silver earrings missing their partners and asked if he’d forgotten them in the dorm and needed to come back and get them.

_No thanks, hyung,_ Soobin had responded. _I don’t think I’ll be using hair product these next few weeks. And I just took one earring from each pair that I have. My rght lobe is almost closed up and I don’t want to re-open the hole. It would be a pain._

_Thanks, though,_ once more, a few minutes later. And that was that.

Soobin hadn’t said that he didn’t want to talk to Yeonjun or asked that Yeonjun not text him anymore – the younger would never say anything like that, even if he wanted to. Yet even though his last messages hadn’t been too different from how he normally texted, Yeonjun’s insecurities burrowed into every space available: the uncorrected spelling mistake, the conspicuous lack of laughing text or subtle aegyo that Soobin usually used. Yeonjun rubs at his cartilage piercing as he re-reads the message for the nth time, threading the backless silver ring rather roughly through its hole in an endless loop. He thinks about what Alice had said. Chaos. Control. It couldn’t get much worse than this, could it?

Actually, it could – they could fight. Soobin could say something quietly devastating, let Yeonjun know once and for all that he doesn’t need the older boy. Their group could fall apart. But at least then Yeonjun would _know,_ for sure _._ At least the math would add up and he’d have an answer at the end of the equation, even if it’s the one he’s most desperately afraid of. He takes a deep breath.

  
  


_Hi Soobin,_ Yeonjun taps out, fingers finding the Korean letters easily. 

_You don’t have to respond to this – I know you want a break and are probably doing a lot of things we wouldn’t be able to do regularly, and I hope you’re having fun and feeling happy. Or maybe something deeper than happiness. I just wanted to say hi, I guess… Well, also I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had one time, about whether we would still be friends, or – anything – if we didn’t have this job, as idols. Do you remember that? I said yes, we could still find each other under any circumstances. To be honest, I don’t know if that’s true. I guess neither of us can really_ know _, though, since we’ll never get a chance to find out._

_Sometimes, I feel like I’m on a spaceship. Everything about this life we have is so extraordinary, so grand. It feels like no one else on the planet can ever really know what it’s like to be us. Even the people who love me, and who I love the most outside of our members – my parents, my middle school friends – they don’t really get it. They’re like, in a different arm of the galaxy. And I can’t ever go there. That scares me. You know that you know me best, right Soobin? You know? It almost can’t be helped… What I mean is that it doesn’t matter what might happen in another life, in a different future. We’re not living those lives. We just have this one, and everything we’ve been through, and maybe we’re only together because we had to be, because there’s only so many astronauts on this spaceship… okay, enough with the metaphor. But who else am I gonna love? Who else is gonna love me? I don’t know. Right now it feels like because of, and maybe a bit in spite of everything, it has to be you._

Yeonjun sighs, rubs his left eye. It’s two minutes to five. He figures Soobin won’t read this message for a few more hours, and who knows how – or if – he’ll respond when he does. 

_You once said to me that just because I want something to be true, doesn’t mean it will be. And I get that. There are a lot of other forces in the world, moving every which way. Sometimes we have to grab on to a falling star passing by for as long as we can, and then let go when the ride is over. It’s scary, the not knowing. The never knowing. But we work with what we’ve got. That’s what we’ve always done, right?_

_I hope you’re finding what you were looking for. I want to know what it is, when we’re all back together. I’m starting to wonder if I should be searching for something too._

_See you later, Soobinie._

Yeonjun hits send just as his cousin comes out from the kitchen with clean dishes.

“Yeonjun _,_ I’ll put away the cups. Five o’clock rush is gonna start soon,” she says, and it takes a moment for him to realize she’s speaking in Korean, the syllables falling a bit heavy on her tongue. 

“Yeah, I got it,” he responds, but the cafe is still empty, so he looks down at his phone to reread the message. The sound of clinking ceramic punctuates lightly in the background. Suddenly, the tiny unread _1_ indicator next to the wall of text disappears and the device slips from his hand. The bottom corner of the phone hits the counter as he scrambles to grab it, bringing it back up close to his face. _Soobin’s awake… and he’s opened the message._ Yeonjun holds his breath and continues looking at the screen. In the distance the bell on the front door of the cafe jingles as a woman files in, then a couple in office attire, followed by two young girls and a boy and then a family of five. His cousin turns on the espresso machine, starts boiling water. The cafe revives, footsteps and chatter and a summer sun stretching its rays across two opposite ends of the globe, painting the skies in a simultaneous greeting and farewell. He puts his phone discreetly by the register but stares at it as long as he can, glancing down even as the first woman approaches the counter with her basket of goods.

_Soobin is typing…_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! I have a lot of thoughts about idol-dom and all of txt and this fic was a good way for me to explore them and also think about love and connection – two things that can take on really enormous and confusing meanings in the context of celebrity even more than in everyday life. I'd love to hear what you think, whether good or bad! i'm also on [cc](https://curiouscat.me/miissedappointments)  
> 


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